Some very satisfying words in album titles this week, if you’ll forgive the fairly tangential way of starting a blog: “Veckatimest”, “Bitte Orca”, and today, “Balf”. “Balf Quarry” is the new album from the Magik Markers – according to the sleevenotes, “A stone quarry in Hartford, CT which has mined traprock since the earliest days of the city.”
I have a default rant about the parlous state of most modern British folk which I wheel out here every couple of months or so. Jim Moray and Seth Lakeman are unfailingly indicted, and Alasdair Roberts is held up as the excellent exception which proves the rule. It’s nice, then, to be presented with a new Alasdair Roberts album, “Spoils”, to justify my prejudices.
Reeling slightly from the bad news about John Martyn, here are the records played in the Uncut office over the last couple of days. Mildly weird mix this week: the glut of Smog is due to me trying to review the new Bill Callahan album, which I'll try and blog about in the next few days.
The Neil Young/”Fork In The Road” business I wrote about yesterday seems to be moving on apace, as things suddenly seem to do in Young’s world. Thrasher’s Wheat now have a video and lyrics of the song.
With blogging, of course, you publish and be damned, then, once damned, you publish again. So it is with the Top 75 I unleashed on an unsuspecting world on Tuesday, only to soon realise that it was, basically, a bit of a cock-up.
As the year comes to an end, I’m putting the finishing touches to a Wild Mercury Sound Top 75 of 2008, which I’ll post here sometime next week. In the meantime, you can muck about with the Uncut hivemind’s 50 favourites by visiting our Rate The Albums feature: let’s make an effort to hype the Endless Boogie album up the charts, people (even though they had to cancel last week’s London show due to some kind of visa problem).
